Or put it another way, assuming you are a taxpayer, you subsidised your own journey by an average of 7.5p per mile.
"A lot of people are going to lose their jobs and this will cost society even more in the end than if you subsidise it a little bit".
It is already difficult in the UK if you subsidise Scotland or Wales, but if there is no shared nationhood this support is very thin.
Now, you subsidise the album and make your money back from touring".
As George Osborne's recent manoeuvres prove, this is exactly how the Conservatives want to reshape politics, pulling the word "worker" away from its residual associations with solidarity, strikes, and all that stuff, and recasting it as the badge you wear when you earn a living, and you resent subsidising anyone who doesn't.
If you don't use public transport then perhaps you resent subsidising those that do.
The message is to forget the state (unless you are a loser); resent your neighbour (he is probably a high earner masquerading as a low earner, to get that social flat you're subsidising with your taxes); and trust the market (where prices are created elegantly, neutrally, perfectly, like physics).
If you're a student on a course that has very few contact hours and is cheap to deliver – ie. maths, English, and most of the humanities – then you're subsidising the flashy labs that your engineering friends use.
If you tax polluting industries, should you not subsidise those that do the reverse?
So if you are one of the 29 public spirited pensioners who decided this winter that you could afford the personal sacrifice and that the government had better things to do with its cash than give it to you to subsidise your heating, then now you know how many of your fellows came to the same conclusion.
But there was another trouble that goes far beyond Vestas.If you must subsidise wind power, as many governments believe, the worst way is by short-term, on-off measures whose future no one can foretell.
